Hello, dreamers. It’s #QuestPit, and now is the perfect time to provide more information on the novel I’m currently querying.

Seven Days on Samarkand

By the 22nd century, Earth’s biosphere has been restored. But the planet is not so much one harmonious world as two: most humans on its surface live in dense cities, sequestered from the vast wild spaces in between. For Earth’s inhabitants, nature is something to visit, not to live in. But not all humans are satisfied seeing their biosphere through glass.

In 2122, a group of five thousand of those individuals arrive in orbit of the star Megrez. Their goal: to establish humanity’s first colony on an unterraformed habitable exoplanet. Among them is Randall Holmes, a biologist and the expedition’s survival expert. Holmes is one of only six humans to have walked upon a habitable exoplanet…and the only one who survived.

Holmes arrives in orbit of Samarkand a broken man, haunted by the experience of watching his former crew die on an alien world and guilt-ridden because, even now, he knows he’d do it again for the chance to see an alien biosphere. When a malfunction on their ship forces the expedition to send down a small advance scout team without support, Holmes jumps at the chance, ready to do it all over again.

Together with the ship’s engineer Nina Stark and enthusiastic young ecologist William Ford, Holmes spends seven days in a river valley on an alien world. He and his companions find strange creatures not seen on Earth since the Cretaceous Period, some beautiful, some dangerous, all incredible. And though they fear how human settlement will change their new planet, none of them are prepared for how it will change them.

Seven Days on Samarkand is a multi-POV hard-scifi novel, featuring themes of conservation, animal intelligence, survival, and redemption. It will work as a standalone novel, but is intended as the first installment of what will become a long-running series. The subsequent book is largely complete, and work has already begun on the following two installments, as well as several series of tie-in short fiction pieces.

If you’re a literary agent repping sci-fi, I encourage you to reach out to me for more information. If you’re simply a reader, thank you for sticking with me thus far, and as always, dare to dream. -MK